OneDrive and PowerShell. They remind me of that song, My Favorite Things. Though I’m not sure which I like more, PowerShell or whiskers on kittens. It’s a close call.

I write a lot of little PowerShell scripts to help me get through the day, and often those scripts fiddle with files that are being synced with OneDrive. In a few cases, if the file is large enough, my PowerShell script will fail because OneDrive will lock the file while it’s syncing it. Both responses are totally understandable. I want PowerShell to stop if it can’t sync a file, and I want OneDrive to sync files when I expect it to. I could, and I have in some cases, written a bunch of PowerShell to check the lock status of a file, to deal with the locking issues that OneDrive creates, and so on. It’s tedious though, and honestly I’m not very good at it. That’s where you all come in…

What I really want, nay, need, is a way to pause OneDrive sync while I’m messing with files I know it will lock when syncing. I need two things, Stop-OneDriveSync and Start-OneDriveSync. That’s it. I asked Santa for them for Christmas, but all I got was socks.

So I took the next step, I whined on Twitter. Someone, suggested I create a UserVoice for it. I thought that was pretty solid advice, so I did.